Washington journalist Jim Bovard, frequent contributor to the American
Spectator, Playboy, and the Wall Street Journal, is the author of "The
Farm Fiasco" (1989), "The Fair Trade Fraud" (1991), and
"Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty" (1994).

Each of Mr. Bovard's books has been a welcome addition to the library
of those who harbor a lingering suspicion that -- behind all the stage-managed
"compassion" -- today's regulatory bureaucracies really function
as little more than costly protection rackets for the kind of vested interests
who can afford to pony up massive "campaign contributions" to
congressmen who know which side their toast is buttered on.

Bovard has always been good at unfurling and tacking down complex government
schemes like butterflies under glass. More importantly, one refers the
casual inquirer to Mr. Bovard's tomes in full confidence they will find
there not merely the opinionated spoutings of some free-market theoretician,
but rather the kind of rigorous scholarship which habitually appends 70
pages of careful notes and indices to the back of each 350-page volume.

If Bovard's early works deserved a criticism, I would have to focus on
his apparent reluctance to inject into his work much judgmental, emotional
content. We find the absurd waste and self-contradiction of one government
boondoggle after another laid bare (the book jacket of Bovard's latest
tome puckishly brags his "writing has been denounced by FBI Director
Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Agriculture,
... the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, and the U.S. International Trade Commission") -- yet where
we looked for the matador to apply his coup de grace, Mr. Bovard would
exasperatingly grin, shrug, and walk away.

That
started to change in last year's "Freedom in Chains." Now, with
the pending September release of Bovard's latest book, "feeling your
pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore
Years" ($26.95 from St. Martin's Press) I believe we are finally
seeing the emergence of a mature and fully formed Jim Bovard, no longer
content to merely shine a light into the rat warren and expect his readers
to reach their own conclusions. Rather, the author now seems fully emotionally
invested in exposing and rooting out the way the fast-talkers and scalawags
have preyed upon the charitable instincts of a good and generous American
people to -- finally -- loot us, disarm us, and even begin to kill us
in our homes.

After eight years of Clintonism, hostility to government is now so widespread
that even census takers take their lives in their hands to announce "I'm
from the government and I'm here to help." And with good reason,
Bovard says:

"From concocting new prerogatives to confiscate private property,
to championing FBI agents' right to shoot innocent Americans, to bankrolling
the militarization of local police forces, the Clinton administration
stretched the power of government on all fronts," Bovard writes.
"From the soaring number of wiretaps, to converting cell phones into
homing devices for law enforcement, to turning bankers into spies against
their customers, free speech and privacy were undermined again and again.
From dictating how many pairs of Chinese silk panties Americans could
buy, to President Clinton's heroic efforts to require trigger locks for
all handguns in crack houses, no aspect of Americans' lives was too arcane
for federal intervention."

Although Clinton famously announced in his 1996 State of the Union address
that "the era of Big Government is over," that turned out to
be nothing but an "intellectual shell game," masking a pattern
of "stealth statism," Bovard asserts. Once the president had
won re-election by again campaigning as a moderate, he "opened the
floodgates" of racial blackmail, IRS plunder, and one assault after
another on our Bill of Rights, all justified by one cynical appeal or
another to "the safety of the children."

Bovard dissects in excruciating detail the way "officer safety"
concerns left Colorado police sitting helpless outside Columbine High
School while victims lay dying inside, on that fateful April day in 1999.
New to me was his revelation that finally, early that afternoon, "SWAT
teams laid down 'cover fire' as they advanced toward the building. Spokesman
(Steve) Davis could not estimate how many shots were fired by the SWAT
teams. Denver attorney Jack Beam stated that the sheriff's department
may be the target of lawsuits because of possible 'friendly fire' casualties."

Does the Clinton administration respond to such bizarre events by asking
what all those Democratic union teachers are doing to our doped-up young
men behind the schoolhouse walls? (One of the Columbine perpetrators had
been turned down upon trying to enlist in the Marines, because his schoolmasters
had him doped up on the psychoactive drug Luvox.)

Of course not. Instead, Bovard reports, "The ATF engaged in institutionalized
perjury to boost its conviction rate" of otherwise innocent gun owners
during the Clinton years, and the administration actually argued before
the Supreme Court in 1994 that Americans commit a felony by merely owning
a gun which might be converted to full-automatic fire. (Justice
Clarence Thomas, writing for a solid 7-2 majority, shot down that nonsense
in the seldom-reported case Staple vs. United States.)

Inevitably and quite properly, the final fifth of the book brings us
back once more to those pinnacles of modern police state achievement,
Waco, Ruby Ridge, and "The Reno-Freeh Whitewash Team."

"The Clinton administration built its 'bridge to the twenty-first
century' by filling every sinkhole along the way with taxpayer dollars,"
Bovard reports. "From AmeriCorps projects that beat the bushes to
recruit new food stamp recipients, to a flood insurance program that multiplied
flood damage, to programs to give the keys to lavish new single-family
homes to public housing residents, the Clinton administration's record
domestic spending produced record fiascoes. For Clinton, the only wasted
tax dollar was one that did not buy a vote, garner a campaign contribution,
or provide a chance to bite his lip on national television.

"In the same way that success of NATO's attacks on Serbia was measured
largely by continual proclamations of 'record numbers' of sorties flown
and 'record numbers' of bombs dropped, so the Clinton administration gauged
its domestic policy successes by the number of new laws passed, new programs
enacted, and new activities prohibited -- by record fines levied and record
prison sentences imposed. Federal agencies issued more than 25,000 new
regulations -- criminalizing everything from reliable toilets to snuff
advertisements on race cars."

Yet "While the media focused primarily on the new benefits that
Clinton promised, little attention was paid to the swelling tax burden
on working Americans. Federal income tax revenue doubled between 1992
and 2000. The total tax burden on the average family with two earners
rose three times faster than inflation. Though the IRS wrongfully seized
hundreds of thousands of Americans' paychecks and bank accounts during
Clinton's reign, almost all of the agency's powers survived unscathed."

And that's just the introduction. From there, Mr. Bovard goes on to document
every word.

Jim Bovard finally appears to be hopping mad, and I for one am glad to
see it. Though many a "tell-all" book about the unlamented Clinton
years is doubtless yet to come, claiming to expose everything from cocaine
dealing in the Lincoln bedroom to who really wrapped up Vince Foster's
body in that Persian carpet and lugged it out to the park, I suspect "feeling
your pain" (yes, it's officially all lower-case) may well survive
as the best political obituary of the Clinton era -- earning Jim Bovard
an honor he might just as soon have forgone as our modern Cassandra, prophesying
doom to an audience deafened by the happy din of the Wall Street jackpot
machine.

For if anyone believes all this makes Mr. Bovard's work a George W. Bush
campaign book -- if anyone out there still believes that merely replacing
the face at the ribbon-cuttings can change the kind of institutionalized
corruption Jim Bovard has spent the better part of the past decade documenting
-- then perhaps we should close by quoting from Mario Puzo's hero Michael
Corleone, who in "The Godfather" turned to his fiancee at his
sister Connie's wedding to ask:

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the
Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by
dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.